1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to techniques for performing queries on textual documents. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for characterizing a textual document based on clusters of conceptually related words.
2. Related Art
Processing text in a way that captures its underlying meaning—its semantics—is an often performed but poorly understood task. This function is most often performed in the context of search engines, which attempt to match documents in some repository to queries by users. It is sometimes also used by other library-like sources of information, for example to find documents with similar content. In general, understanding the semantics of text is an extremely useful subcomponent of such systems. Unfortunately, most systems written in the past have only a rudimentary understanding, focusing only on the words used in the text, not the meaning behind them.
As an example, let us consider the actions of a user interested in finding a cooking class in palo-alto, calif. This user might type into a popular search engine the set of words “cooking classes palo alto”. The search engine then typically looks for those words on web pages, and combines that information with other information about such pages to return candidate results to the user. Currently, if the document has the words “cooking class palo alto” several of the leading search engines will not find it, because they do not know that the words “class” and “classes” are related, because one is a subpart—a stem—of the other.
Prototype systems with stemming components have been attempted but without any real success. This is because the problem of determining whether a stem can be used in a particular context is difficult. That might be determined more by other nearby words in the text rather than by the word to be stemmed itself. For example, if one were looking for the James Bond movie, “for your eyes only”, a result that returned a page with the words “for your eye only” might not look as good.
In general, existing search systems and other such semantic processing systems have failed to capture much of the meaning behind text.
Hence, what is needed is a method and an apparatus that processes text in a manner that effectively captures the underlying semantic meaning within the text.